The pylons are definitely a pain in the *** when you are first learning the encounter, but as long as your raid are patient and give you the tries needed to learn it, then it becomes doable 100% of the time.

My advice for doing it is simply to position Soa in the centre of the room and watch for him pulling the pylon out of the wall. Don't start moving him immediately, as the pylon can sometimes have some lateral movement as it is inverting. Once you see the pylon is in almost at full tilt, you now have a lot better idea of which direction to run. Just run at the pylon and as you think you are under it, just spin and pan the camera up so you can see Soa and the Pylon and just manoeuvre backwards until you're sure he's under.

The only tricky really ones are when they are right at the edge as you have quite a distance to move him after waiting, then need to position Soa and then move to the side of the Pylon in case you're a wee bit close, so you don't get punted back into the lava when it drops (although a Sorc yoinked me out when this happened on our first kill!).